Mass. Appeal

By John Kenneth Galbraith

Published: March 17, 1996

While the Music Lasts My Life in Politics. By William M. Bulger. Illustrated. 328 pp. Boston: A Richard Todd Book/ Houghton Mifflin Company. $22.95.

Quite a few years ago, while representing the great Republic in India, I had a call one day from Jawaharlal Nehru. He was going on a short holiday and wanted to know if I had a good book to take with him. Indian resources could be limited even for a prime minister. After some thought I sent him "The Last Hurrah," by Edwin O'Connor, a book, at very slight remove, on James Michael Curley of Boston and Massachusetts. Nehru was delighted, called me to say so and on later holidays or journeys never failed to ask if I had something as good. This I rarely did.

Now, were I asked, I would offer him William M. Bulger. Mr. Bulger, known to all as Billy, is an accomplished writer, with a phenomenal memory that one suspects is refreshed on occasion in a moderate way by invention. He draws on a rich store of classical and general literary recollection. And he has an engaging subject with which to deal. It is the Great and General Court, as our legislature on Beacon Hill in Boston is denoted. For the last 17, repeat 17, years he was president of the Massachusetts Senate; before the Senate he was in the House, to which he was elected while still a law student. Over nearly all of these years he also practiced law in a marginal but not, evidently, a wholly unremunerative way. He somehow found the money to provide for his supportive wife, Mary, and to educate their nine children. He contends at some length that his public and private income were separated in an entirely wholesome way, which is something fairly rare in Massachusetts politics.

Once, when his law practice got extended to a politically unhealthy, if distant, association with a highly questionable real estate operator, Mr. Bulger made a point (here related in detail) of remitting roughly a quarter-million-dollar advance on his fee. That money he greatly needed, and he concludes his account by saying, "Money is not happiness, yet for at least a brief time it can offer a delightfully close imitation." On the evidence of this book and in a view not shared by his enemies, including his relentless critic, The Boston Globe, Billy Bulger was, at a minimum, a very careful man.

But Mr. Bulger himself is not the major attraction of this book -- or, more precisely, he would not be except for the political context. That is Boston, the Boston Irish and Boston politics. Elsewhere in the United States politics is a stolid affair of public service, public persuasion and, of course, basic honesty and the lapses therefrom. In Boston, politics is an art form. It is something to be watched, appraised and enjoyed; there are good players and bad, those admired and those rejected. It is a matter of local theater, and of nothing are the participants -- and the audience -- so aware as good or bad performance. Mr. Bulger performed wonderfully well over the years; he would not have received equal attention or written as engaging a book had he emerged in New York or Chicago or, needless to say, Los Angeles.

There was, to be sure, serious business. A good part of this book is devoted to Mr. Bulger's war on busing -- the taking of children from his beloved South Boston to other schools, especially in the neighboring black Roxbury, and bringing youngsters from there to his personal territory. It was his strongly held view that to each community belonged its own life and services and, particularly, its own schools. This was not racism, Mr. Bulger contends; it was the right of every community to its own. Here, as elsewhere, he is relentless in his condemnation of those who lacked this view, and especially of Judge W. Arthur Garrity, who supervised the busing. Judge Garrity, he observes, had been "appointed up the ladder until he arrived at his level of incompetence," adding that "it seemed to me our Neighborhood had become Judge Garrity's white whale, and that only its destruction would bring him peace."

The anger here lingers on. At the time, some 30 years ago, I would note, I favored the busing; now, with most others, I am not so sure. To the extent that race was not the controlling force, the case for community-based schools had undoubted merit.

"While the Music Lasts" is in sprightly English, with the allusions of an exceedingly well-read author. As this is written, Mr. Bulger has just become president of the large, sprawling, needful and sometimes troubled University of Massachusetts. As were many others, I was asked about his appointment when it was pending. I approved: education, and its guidance in the university, is the divine right of the faculty. No president can have much effect on that. The president's job is to get the money -- in this case from the legislature. For this Billy Bulger has the highest qualifications, a lifetime of experience.

But also, as this book shows, he could well teach a course on writing nonfiction, with perhaps an occasional touch of fiction. It would, with all else, show his superior talent for literary allusion and personal insult.

Photo: William M. Bulger presiding over a joint session of theMassachusetts legislature. (FROM "WHILE THE MUSIC LASTS")